You can be ditsy, or you can be political. But if you're so eager to establish your ditsiness, why should we listen to your politics? Shappi Khorsandi is having her cake and eating it. She wants to talk about events in her native Iran, but is so scared of alienating anyone by doing so that she has to couch her opinions in strenuous niceness and consensual anti-intellectualism. The result is an hour of conventional comment on geopolitics amid much directionless banter and biographical gossip.

The show, called The Distracted Activist, is about Khorsandi's involvement in various protest campaigns since moving to England from pre-revolution Iran at the age of four. It's thin on material, and thick on personable backchat with the front row. She talks about her student politics, and her community theatre work with the homeless, but not to any discernible effect, comic or otherwise.

There's also some standard-issue stuff about getting old – old enough to remember dating in the era before the arrival of the mobile phone. More fruitful are Khorsandi's reflections on having her first child, and the offence she took at the maternity hospital for classifying the hours-old tot by its supposed "mixed race".

She clearly cares about injustice; and her flashes of social conscience mark Khorsandi out from many standups on the fringe. But there's a weird gap between her self-professed bubble-headedness (she tries to read John Pilger but finds herself watching EastEnders instead, ho hum) and all this talk of appearing on Question Time and al-Jazeera.

"I try so hard not to offend anyone," blurts Khorsandi at one point, after an ill-advised ad-lib with a gay journalist in the front row. But she takes unthreatening too far. Talking politics while straining to appear apolitical, she cancels herself out.